What this book covers

Chapter 1, Cloud9 IDE, gives the essential information you need before you start programming on BeagleBone. It gives hardware and software-related information about the boards in the BeagleBone series. It provides you different ways to connect to BeagleBone and start Cloud9 IDE to program.

Chapter 2, Blinking Onboard LEDs, covers how to use Cloud9 IDE to write the first physical computing program—blinking onboard LED on the BeagleBone. It covers another program that creates a display pattern among the LEDs.

Chapter 3, Blinking External LEDs, explains the General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) theory and how to attach the external LEDs to the GPIO pins. Then, it covers blinking LED and display pattern programs.

Chapter 4, Controlling LED Using a Push Button, teaches how to read from input components using polling. The interrupt method programs for each of these methods are covered.

Chapter 5, Reading from Analog Sensors, covers the theory about Analog I/O and how BeagleBone supports it. Then, it has programs to read from the TMP36 temperature sensor and light sensor.

Chapter 6, PWM – Writing Analog Information, explains how the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technique is used to write the analog information and how BeagleBone supports it. It has a program to fade-in LED and control the servo motor using PWM.

Chapter 7, Internet of Things with BeagleBone, explains how to implement IoT in JavaScript using BeagleBone. It covers important information about IoT. Then, there are three real-life examples. Two of them are programs to remotely control LED and servo motor. Another program is to shoot an e-mail alert when overtemperature is detected.

Chapter 8, Physical Computing in Python, explains rewriting all the programs that are covered from Chapter 3 to Chapter 6 in the Python language.

Chapter 9, UART, I2C, SPI Programming, covers popular buses in the embedded systems—UART, I2C, and SPI. All these protocols are explained here in detail. This chapter covers programs that communicate over each of these buses.

Chapter 10, Internet of Things Using Python, teaches IoT programs in Python. It has programs that were similar to the programs covered in Chapter 7. It has an additional program that uploads the temperature data over the Cloud website and we will receive the temperature graph over time for analysis.

Appendix A, GPIO Control in Bash, teaches how to set the direction and turn GPIO on/off directly by writing sysfs files.

Appendix B, BeagleBone Capes, provides information about BeagleBone add-on boards called capes.

Appendix C, Pinmux and the Device Tree, gives details about the new hardware description files that help the kernel to initialize BeagleBone. They are called device tree. It covers how to use the device tree files to select the role of the BeagleBone pin among other possibilities.

This book does not cover BeagleBone Programmable Realtime Units (PRUs) and building/customising installable image.